Ep. 632: Foundations - Understanding The Whitetail Timing Game

but it's not. It's actually kind of a play on last week's show about learning the land. Right now, we have a free window of time at least till the ticks come out, where we can learn a bunch about our local white tails. No matter how many we spook or how many miles we walk on our hunting grounds, the passage of time will erase any negative effects associated

with it. And it's just a really good thing that truly understand how to cut down on the amount of negative juju we bring to the woods that those pesky bucks and does might just pick up on. When your job involves talking for hundreds of hours and then thousands of people listen to your ramblings, you find out all kinds of interesting things. Honestly, the same goes for writing

articles or creating videos posting on social media. What you learn is that most people don't care that much one way or the other what you say or do, as long as it fits roughly into the role they believe you fill. If you don't stray too far out of your lane, they pretty much let it slide and don't get a red ass about it. You also find a smaller subset of the audience that is just your ride

or die crowd. They decide, for whatever reason, that you're a pretty swell guy, and they'll defend that to the bitter end. Obviously, having a few of those people on your side is pretty nice. But there's another subset. Those are the folks who seem to be looking to get offended. They suck and I wish they would go do something challenging in their lives every day, so they had learned that the reason they seek drama is because they aren't

getting what they need out of life. We see examples of these folks all the time, but I think there are a much smaller segment of society than it seems they just happen to be real vocal and really into getting attention. They are the folks who will try to

get you to self censor or worse. A lot of this behavior seems to come from main character syndrome that seems to make them real sensitive, and they take things personal, even if the things they are mad about couldn't possibly be personal, because well, the person they are mad at doesn't know them or care about them. One of the first times I really encountered this was when I wrote the white Tail column for Outdoor News, now my weekly column. At one point I wrote about a Wisconsin buck I shot,

like I don't know seven or eight years ago. All that buck came in and I hit him in the shoulder on opening night, and when he ran away, it looked like the penetration was good enough, even if my shot placement wasn't so great. Now, with a forecast in the low thirties overnight, I left him for the morning, not wanting to risk pushing him if I was dealing with a one long hit or something else that wasn't

going to be immediately fatal. So when a buddy and I returned at first light, we ended up finding a pretty sparse blood trail, but it was good enough that we eventually found that buck after I think dont an hour and a half two hours. He was nice and cool and dead and ready to be field dressed and wrestled back to the truck. Now, so I wrote about that, dear,

because I had to write about deer every week. And the week after that column published, they ran a letter to the editor about how irresponsible I was to leave a buck overnight. The letter writer made it clear there was never a good reason to leave a deer in the woods overnight, and he also not so subtly made it known that the meat could not have possibly been worth saving. Honestly, it was bizarre. So I sent my editor an email and I said, uh, what's up with

this dude? And he called me up and he said, the guy who sent that letter in sends a letter in every week, literally fifty two times a year. That seems that this old farmer from northwestern Minnesota goes through that paper when he gets it until he finds something to be offended about, and then he fires off a nastygram or an old fashioned letter. I'm sure someone with a degree in psychology could weigh in on that with some interesting insights with regard to that fellow. Now here's

the thing. In my position, I can get mad at that dude, which I usually do, or I could let it go. I can self answer to not have to deal with people like him. I can do a lot of things. But the truth is, it wouldn't matter if I cleaned up my act and try to make any one individual happy. There would be someone else who was just ready to try to cancel me or force my speech in a certain way. Because that's the nature of

this whole thing. Now, why do I tell you this Because so many of the things we do impact others in ways we probably can't imagine. If you think this isn't true, go work customer service or retail for a day or two. Maybe try out being a waiter or a waitress for a week, Go do a right along with a local police officer. Maybe talk to a nurse

or an E M T about their work. My point is we make decisions every day that we think might benefit us or make us feel a little superior, and we often don't see how far those ripples spread in the old pond of life. We might not see who is affected by them, and we might not care, but I think we should just like it's not the waitress's fault you don't like your burger, or maybe she has twice as many tables to handle on a given night

because they're stoner coal worker called in sick again. It's also a reality that when we go into the woods, we make a lot of decisions for ourselves. We think they'll benefit us or make us feel better because they'll hopefully get us closer to putting an arrow through the lungs of a buck. But those same decisions, when we often think are pretty benign, can be working against us in ways we can't really imagine, and we'll probably never

fully understand. Those are the worst, I bet, because they are the ones that your target buck is paying attention to and might be the ones that make him decide he's had enough a daylight movement for a couple of weeks, or that even though he'd rather take a specific trail through the woods to get to his betting area, he's going to travel a different one that leads through a much thicker habitat and around the stand that you've sat

three times in a row. You see, we often think about how other hunters or coyotes or whatever affect the deer movement. We give I think a little too much weight to those things sometimes because it's easier than acknowledging that we are the ones putting the deer down. We are the ones burning our spots or leaving a cent trail through an area a hunter hasn't set foot in for a month. What we do impacts the deer we are hunting, maybe more than anything else, and at least

a lot of different situations. I believe that to be true. I learned this early on in my dear hunting career, although I probably didn't really understand it fully until I had been at this stuff for a long time. When I was just starting out, it seemed like the guys my dad and I hunted with, and hell, my dad either killed bucks right away in the season or often not at all. I bet you can guess why, but

if not, I'll tell you. Those scrapper bucks they mostly shot around the mid September opener here in Minnesota hadn't been messed with four nine months. I know that's a letdown, but it's true. The reality was that back then we didn't have trail cameras we didn't have food plots. We had our feet and our eyeballs, and we saw deer in fields at last light, or we looked at tracks on the trails and we set stands for those deer. We did this in midsummer and then just got the

hell out of the woods. In the first couple of times we hunted, or those guys hunted anyway, someone would occasionally shoot a buck that just hadn't had time to catch up to the program. That was it. After opening weekend, all bets were off and things got a lot harder. You can see this on a much larger scale when you look at the breakdown of when deer are shot during a general gun season. The bulk of them will die on opening day or opening weekend, and then the

harvest numbers fall right off the old cliff. Now it's not as simple as the deer going holy crappy Oli. There are thousands of predators in the woods right now. It's also a matter of hunter effort, with a majority of hunter spending opening weekend in the woods and then not hunting again. So I guess if you're gonna have five hunters in the woods one day versus a hundred thousand the next day, five hundreds gonna kill more deer

A fe've hunted guns season after the opener. You know that even though the woods are much more empty of hunters on I don't know, Wednesday than they were on Saturday, the deer movement can be real disappointing. That's grand scale stuff and pretty easy to understand. But what about your own hunting on your own spots. Remember in the intro to this podcast where I mentioned the window we have

right now to scout without negative hunting repercussions. So true time is your friend, because it works to convince the deer they're safer by the day. Your presence, whether observed directly or felt strongly after you're gone, kind of resets the old clock. Enough presence and you create the dear version of the kind of lunatic who writes a nasty letter to a newspaper every week about something that really doesn't matter at all. You don't want your whole audience

full of those guys, if you get my drift. So why does it matter now? Because it pays to think about how you'll impact the deer when you do hunt them in like seven or eight months. It pays to understand the weight of the decisions you make around pressure and your presence, and how you'll mitigate the whole thing to keep the deer from being overly sensitive to your presence. This is not as easy as it sounds. You know why. There are several reasons. The first is that we look

at white tails like they just aren't going anywhere. They do have relatively small home ranges, and we often get lulled into too much false confidence that the bucks aren't going to leave our ground. If we spook them in late September, they'll still be around a chase dose during the rut. That may be true, But why I spook them at all? If you don't have to or think about it a different way. Most of the places you and I hunt probably don't encompass a deer's whole home range.

Maybe you're hunting forty acres and too much sloppy presents on it will push the deer to the neighbor's ground. After all, the deer lived there too. I don't know. If you had one room in your house that was infested with scorpions or black mambas, you'd probably spend more time in a room that wasn't infected with scorpions, and

black Mamba's right. The danger of believing the bucks really aren't going anywhere because of their genetic hardwearing that tells them six or seven acres is plenty is that we often don't think of how much ground that actually is. What's worse is that these rules only apply when the sun is shining, but our trail cameras work at night,

when all bets are off. So the buck that might be as good as gone because he's onto you in the daylight could eat easily walk by your camera at midnight and make you think that he's still in play. This is kind of a white tail specific thing. It would probably really be driven home if you were lucky enough to hunt out west for big meal deer with an absolute killer like Randy Armer or Nate Simmons over

at Western Hunter. Those guys find a big deer and their whole goal is to not let them know they're being hunted, because those mountain bucks that are so visible in a specific basin now will bust the hell on out of there when they figure out that they're being stalked or even watched. Sometimes could badass hunters like those guys find them again three basins over sure, but they don't want to have to try because it's not a guarantee and the whole thing is going to get a

lot harder than next go round. So where does all this rambling intersect with you, a white tail hunter and the offseason conditions we are facing now? Because it's never too early to figure out how you'll go about your year as a white tail hunter with a keen I towards your impact on the deer. I think about it all in reference to timing. Right now, I can blow mll the deer out of there all I want and

it won't affect me in September. What can I learn about the land, which is what last week's episode was all about. It's just damn near like a positive. Anything I learned is good. The downsides are so low they might not even really register. That's why so many of the best deer hunters spent so much time winter scouting. I know you've heard me say that a lot, but I'm gonna keep saying it. You know you might, but what if you only hunt a small property and it

doesn't really require a bunch of winter scouting? Okay, how many stand sites do you have? How many access points? How do they allow you to play potential conditions throughout the various months of the hunting season, and how can you lay out your options to keep your impact as light as possible. Can you go out and trim a

few entrance trail now? Okay? Do that The trails you cut now will grow in some during the summer, but to give you a real advantage for going in and out undetected, and they won't have any effect right now. If you go in, it's free time. It's a free hit, free play or whatever. That's a good start. Or do you have a favorite stand site that starts out really good but fizzles out after a few hunts? Is there a better way to get there? Or is it your favorite because it's easy to get to and hunt and

you don't really give yourself too many other options. Should you be looking at other parts of your property that might be better suited for a few ground blinds? What kind of an ambush plan can you put together? Now? While you've got tons of time. Now, even if you don't hang stands, you had to put out some blinds. You can start to decide where you'll do it and

maybe trim some shooting lanes or whatever. Right now, maybe you can stack up some dead falls on the edge of a meadow so that in August you can slip in and really brush in the ground line. This is like at certain times when the yellow penalty flag goes fly in an NFL game and the quarterback knows he essentially has a free play to work with, so he

takes a shot deep. As you're thinking about this and how you can cut down on your felt presence in September by doing stuff, now, think about your trail camera strategy too. Can you buy some lithium batteries to keep your cameras running for months while you stay the hell out of the woods. Remember, your presence in the woods is a negative no matter what, even if it's just a seemingly innocuous little camera check. Three weeks before the season opens, do you have an idea where you might

sit around the opener? But also, three weeks into the season, how about a little rut funnel that you can leave alone. Now you might be thinking, sure, but there are other people hunting my ground, and who knows what those idiots will do? No one, probably not even those idiots. Really no. But you can't control them, so you just have to decide on how to set yourself up for success. And a big part of that he's understanding how to lessen

your impact and play the timing game. This all goes back to what I talked about last week about learning the land and learning the habitat and how dear use specific parts of the terrain and when they should use it. I mean, think about this in terms of the lead up to the season. You just have this amazing window there, but throughout the season, when you hunt and where you hunt should also be filtered through how much of an impact you've had on the deer recently and how much

you'll impact them with each hunt. If you have set ups for various winds and have worked on some access in the off season, you're probably already ahead of the competition. This allows you to keep the deer from getting overly sensitive to your presence and allows you to create a situation where, even on smallish properties you know you're gonna have some options, they'll tend to hunt a little bigger.

If you really think it through now, all of this might seem so far off and not really that urgent right now, but now is when you should start war working on that plan. This is like the corner stone of winter scouting. You get a freebee and you get to do this work now that's going to pay off.

Every little bite of work you take now can add up to a pretty damn satisfying meal come deer season, and if you actively try to keep the deer from knowing you're after them to the best of your abilities, the dessert will be something sweet and delicious and hopefully worthy of a gripping grin. So think about the land, think about how the deer use it, Think about your

individual spot, and then think about timing. Plan for the best options to rest spots, to mitigate your felt presence, and to keep the deer moving during daylight hours in areas where you can have close encounters. Start that right now and keep it going all summer long, and you have the recipe for one hell of a good season.

And tune in next week when I plan to talk about how to get creative in finding new places to hunt, because it's never a add thing to be trying to suss out some places they are going to give you permission, or maybe some new public land or whatever that's it for this week, my friends, I'm Tony Peterson has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always thank you so much for listening and for supporting us here at meat Eater,

we really appreciate it. If you want more white tail content, head on over to our wire to Hunt YouTube channel or to the meat eater dot com slash wired and you'll get everything you need to be the baddest ask deer hunter you could possibly imagine. Maybe